THE KALEIDOSCOPE OF DESTINY

An Armenian teen endures the 1915 Armenian genocide in Ignatius’ coming-of-age historical novel.

Taking the perspective of a teen boy named Arakel, the story takes readers through the genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire, from the beginning of the unrest through unlawful arrests and death marches into the Syrian Desert. Arakel’s brother is the first member of his family to be taken by the government; then his father is arrested. When Turkish soldiers drive Arakel, his grandparents, his mother, and his sister into the desert along with all of the other Armenian residents of their town, the narrative vividly conveys the ways in which starvation and heat slowly prey upon the people. Terrorized and traumatized, Arakel shuts his mind against much of the violence; readers learn that his grandparents have died, but the specifics remain fuzzy. Kidnapped by one caravan before being temporarily adopted by another family of nomadic (possibly Bedouin) Arabs, Arakel sees how some people try to help the persecuted Armenians when and where they can. After being dropped at an orphanage, he’s enlisted as an interpreter and asked to guide German missionaries to a hospital, where he learns that other groups are trying to help Armenians. This is when he witnesses thousands of dead Armenians at Goeljuk Lake, a sight that breaks him: “More naked bodies lie heaped under bushes. Bodies fill ravines around the lake and along the shore, faces turned toward the sky, faces pressed into the ground, a row of heads sticking up from the sand near the water, corpses piled at the foot of cliffs. Thousands of them.” This moving account of the Armenian genocide highlights a period of history that’s often overlooked and deserves a place on classroom bookshelves and on reading lists next to Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. The moments in which Arakel experiences kindness and friendship among all the horrors he sees are stirring reminders of the resilience of humanity. The ending is ambiguous, which might be frustrating for some readers.

A beautiful and poignant novel that humanizes the Armenian genocide for a contemporary audience.